Are we alone?
The Slow Newscast
Alice Sandelson
4.6 • 894 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald Trump promised to release classified files about extraterrestrials. But even if they disappoint the millions of people hoping to find proof of existence of aliens, there is a growing belief in the scientific community that it is only a matter of time before proof of life outside our solar system is found.
Reporter: Giles Whittell
Producer: Matt Russell
Sound design: Dominic Delargy
Artwork: Lola Williams
Editor: Jasper Corbett
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tortus. |
| 0:09.7 | A lot of people are very interested in footage of UFOs. |
| 0:14.4 | The Pentagon has released a few videos, and there's been anecdotal reports from fighter pilots. So a lot of people want to know, |
| 0:24.1 | will you help push the Pentagon to release more footage, which a lot of people claim is available? |
| 0:31.2 | Oh, yeah, sure. I would do that. I would do that. I'd love to do that. I have to do that. |
| 0:36.0 | But they also are pushing me on Kennedy. |
| 0:38.3 | And I did release a lot, but I had people come to me and beg me not to do it. |
| 0:43.3 | But I'll be doing that very early on. |
| 0:46.3 | That was two months before last year's U.S. election, which Donald Trump won. |
| 0:51.3 | He's a skilled politician. |
| 0:53.3 | Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe |
| 0:56.2 | intelligent life exists on other planets, so there had to be a big overlap between those two-thirds |
| 1:01.3 | and the roughly half of the American public planning to vote for him. There was no harm in |
| 1:06.7 | keeping them on side. Six months on, the UFO documents have not yet been declassified. |
| 1:13.8 | But if Trump's record of keeping promises on other subjects is anything to go by, they will be. |
| 1:20.4 | And then, it's fair to imagine, two things will happen. |
| 1:25.1 | Thing one, within the UFO believer community, a wave of disappointment, as once secret papers fail to |
| 1:32.0 | prove that aliens and alien spacecraft have been stored for decades in US government |
| 1:37.4 | facilities in the Nevada desert. |
| 1:40.5 | Thing two, a fresh spike of excitement about the possibility of extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligent life. |
| 1:50.7 | Why? Because we know much more about the universe than we used to. |
| 1:58.0 | In 1950, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked some friends at lunch, where is everybody? |
... |
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